


Creeping Nothingness

by Nebula42



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Deathfic, Depression, Sam-Centric, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-29 00:11:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6351115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebula42/pseuds/Nebula42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>TW: Suicide, Depression. if this stuff triggers you, please don't read it. take care of yourselves.<br/>Sam fights a monster, and loses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Creeping Nothingness

For a while, he didn’t really notice anything different.

Sure, his smile might have been a little less frequent or a little stiffer, but shit was tough at the moment so he rationalised it as a pretty normal outcome.

After a while he found himself getting moodier, irritable and more abrasive than he was once, Dean remarking more than once that he should ‘take that chip off his shoulder before he took it off for him’ and ‘quit acting like a chick’.

He snorted but really couldn’t argue with his brother, if he had to sit in the car with himself and his ‘mood’ for 8 hours, he’d have punched himself in the face.

Sometimes he’d find himself sitting alone, researching or cleaning the guns, and feel moisture dripping down his face for no apparent reason (he was not going to admit to tears. that implied some emotion or at least provocation). Thank god it didn’t happen when Dean was around, or he would’ve had to put up with endless shit-stirring on the subject of ‘Sammy, crying over nothing like a PMSing chick’.

It still really didn’t occur to him that anything was wrong, even when he stopped really feeling anything.

Sure, he still felt irritation at Dean’s endlessly repetitive five cassette tapes played over and over on endless car rides through the ass-back and beyond of the central US. Maybe hunger? Sometimes? And a low level angry burn in the pit of his stomach when he was forced to talk to dumbasses that sold their souls to the devil for a better mortgage interest rate, but that seemed pretty normal right?  
But when even those failed to register any more, perhaps he should have clued in that something wasn’t quite right.

This was the point at which Dean began to watch him a little closer, and Sam noticed him noticing, and just felt that mild, low level irritation at the attention that people tend to reserve for continuous noises and whiny children.

Several times during several car rides through the same part of east-jesus-nowhere America, he could see Dean opening his mouth as if to start a conversation, struggle with it for a bit, and then set his jaw in that toothache-inducing clench that you could almost hear. Sam would just turn his head and keep looking out at the same fucking countryside.

Sam found hunts that were endemically high in emotion far more tiring than your average salt-and-burn. Not for the reasons he used to find them tiring though, for when the unfairness of life wasted tugged at his heart, or comments or interactions ran a little too close to his memories of (fights with) Dad.

No, he found these tiring now for having to pretend to feel anything about these hunts at all, and trying to convince Dean that the hunts still weighed on his previous compassion.  
And as tiring as trying to convince Dean on these hunts was, he could tell by the watchfulness in Dean that he wasn’t convincing him. Not even a little bit.

And when Dean started a conversation about mental health and Sam ‘not being the same as he used to be’, Sam picked a massive fight, cutting at all the soft spots he knew Dean had: from Dad to failed hunts to lost lovers like Cassie and Lisa. 

Dean stood there getting angrier and angrier at Sam until he exploded and cut right back with Sam’s abandonment of the family and the demon blood running through his veins and his ‘complete inability to keep his shit together!’. 

The words stung a little, maybe more than a little, but it mainly just gave him an excuse to turn around and storm out the door.

He hot-wired a car a little while later and drove until he couldn’t anymore. He threw his phone out the window at some point on the road. Couldn’t bring himself to care about that either.

He found a dingy motel that looked just like all the others at the opposite end of the country from where he’d walked out on Dean. He booked for two weeks, not really having the energy to plan further than that (somewhere, not so deep down, he really didn’t think he’d live that long).

Now that Dean wasn’t around, he began to realise something probably wasn’t OK. Even when he went out for food, but especially in the hours he spent in that room, he noticed a creeping nothingness that in retrospect had been there for a while now.

He honestly couldn’t bring himself to be anything more than mildly aware of this.

Mostly a total lack of energy and a rather emphatic desire not to encounter any people kept him inside, but when he did go out, he found himself idly wondering if he should walk out in front of one of the semi-trucks that roared through town too fast. 

Not that he really wanted to die so much, he mostly just wondered if he’d find it hard to do. 

He tested that theory with a bottle of cheap whiskey and a pack of razor blades.

He woke up with a pounding headache and blood all over the sheets, and the knowledge that it wasn’t that hard at all.

By this point he was vaguely aware that something was seriously wrong with him, but that was overshadowed by the increasing awareness that he really didn’t want to be alive any more. 

Not that he was going out in a blaze of self-hatred or because no one loved him (self-hatred was more emotion than he could dredge up in a week, and he knew on some level that Dean probably cared for him too much), it was more that he just no longer wanted to try and pretend to function for the restaurant staff and the liquor store owner. 

Functioning with the creeping numbness was hard, and got harder the longer he spent time alone, which he did more of because functioning with the numbness was hard.

This circular logic bothered the part of his brain not pickled by alcohol or greyed by numbness, but that honestly wasn’t a large enough part to bother listening to.

He walked off a cliff in a nothing seaside town in the middle of nowhere 3 days later. He felt nothing as he fell.

Nothing.

Dean was 1265 miles behind and gaining when Sam outran the nothingness. 

The authorities found a burner phone with only Dean’s number in it and rang him to let him know.

Dean ended the call and pulled over, got out, and was vigorously sick on the side of the road. 

Then he sat in the car with his head in his hands until he could work up the energy to call Bobby. 

Dean drove the rest of the 1264 miles to identify Sam’s body. 

And felt nothing the entire way there.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry about this, it had to be written.
> 
> seriously though, if you or a loved one are showing any symptoms like this then please talk to someone. this is not in any way, shape or form a picture of good metal health or healthy coping mechanisms.
> 
> (if I've missed any important tags/ratings please let me know, I've never posted on this site before)
> 
> comments/criticisms welcome.


End file.
